On the face of it, it seems strange that on this of all weeks, I have felt a deep and resonant nourishment in both body and soul.
It’s been a week when the pandemic finally hit home, when family members (not in our household) have been affected. It’s been a week of changing plans, as I lean towards homeschooling my oldest rather than sending her to kindergarten, largely because our housing situation over the next several months is so up in the air. It’s been a week when we received the news that Matt’s uncle had passed away in the early of the morning, a fact that, while not surprising, still tugged at our hearts and has made us pray ever more earnestly for the wellbeing of the family he’s left behind. It’s been a week when we had a house inspection and lots of packing, when the realization that our move is less than 3 weeks away really started to hit.
On the surface, it would seem like it should have been a week of feeling strung-out and raw, and while this week had those moments of stress and worry and uncertainty and frustration and sadness, I largely felt a deep sense of peace. Of intense gratitude. Of an unmistakable sense of being home, and of relishing in the fact of being home.
In 19 days, we will leave this house behind forever. We will no longer live in the place where we moved in with one toddler and later brought two baby boys from the hospital, where we built raised beds and a sandbox and a cut flower garden, where I’ve made thousands of meals and baked hundreds of batches of cookies and wiped runny noses and changed diapers and done laundry.
There is a sadness to that, and I raged against the idea for quite awhile, struggling against it.
But when I finally just let myself accept that our path is taking us elsewhere, that HOME can be elsewhere, that we can always start again and build again and create memories again—that is when the peace came.
The peace and the feeling of nourishment this week has also come from me turning away from social media for much of the week and turning towards things that truly fill my soul—reading inspiring memoirs, studying scriptures, praying often and fervently. It’s come from allowing myself to not just list things I’m grateful for, but rather to allow myself to FEEL that gratitude, because I’ve finally learned that they’re not quite the same thing.
I’ve also learned that, ironic though it is, it is easiest to feel the beauty of everything when you’re about to leave it. As I take my daily walk around our garden and admire the poppies (we got some poppies! they take me by surprise with their nodding coral-pink blooms every time) and snap a pea pod off the vine and chuckle at the chickens as they follow me along the fence, clucking at me as they wonder why I haven’t brought out kitchen scraps, I can feel my heart welling up with gratitude for the path that took us here to this very home in this very neighborhood in this very town.
And as I’ve prayed over many things this week, I am filled with a great sense of possibility at what awaits us—for the new community we’ll form, for the new gardens we’ll plant, for the new home we’ll create again, together.
Yes, this week has nourished me with a seemingly endless string of joys dangling in front of me, even amidst all of the harder things. And perhaps that’s why they have caught my eye so readily—because my tired soul had been looking that much harder for them.
